Model-Based Approaches to Reengineering Web Pages

Today's web sites are increasingly being accessed through a wide variety of computing platforms ranging from the workstation to a laptop and through multiple access devices such as Internet Screen Phone, TV Set Top box, PDA, and cellular phones. Web sites are rarely de-signed and developed to fit such a large variety of contexts of use as each context (e.g., each computing platform, each device) has its own set of constraints. This pa-per describes a model-based approach for reengineering web pages into a presentation and a dialog model stored with XIML, a model-based userinterface specification language. These models are then further exploited to reengineer other user interfaces either for the same context of use (by changing presentation design options) or for different contexts of use (by changing properties of computing platform model). For this purpose, three key elements of the presentation model (i.e. presentation units, logical windows, and abstract interaction objects) and two key elements of the dialog model (i.e., navigational structure and transition) were defined.